Glacier Hunting Off Greenland’s Frozen Coast

If you want to see some of the world’s most impressive icebergs, the Cape Race—a boat built for scientists and adventurers with a high threshold for unexpected delays—will take you. On it, we explored the remote coast of Greenland, a place of awe-inspiring beauty.

I'm afloat above the Arctic Circle on the MV Cape Race, a 110-foot commercial fishing trawler refurbished as an expedition yacht, my back turned to the northwest coast of Greenland. The clouds over Disko Bay burn with incandescent warmth, the glow of an August sunset that will linger until midnight, creating the illusion of elastic time at this extreme latitude, where the year’s daylight divides unequally among the months, leaving high summer with no dark at all. The sea’s color is tarnished silver, and it lies as smooth and heavy as cooking oil. Stately icebergs, some more than a hundred feet tall, process, aloof and isolated in the slow current, in an infinite spectrum of pale tones: chalk, moonstone, meringue, the faint blue of skim milk. The violence of their frigid birth, calved from glaciers that descended from Greenland’s inland ice sheet, is evident in their rough planes. Some contain deep fissures sealed over with frozen meltwater that gleams the fake blue of swimming pools. Others tinge green along their broken facets, as if cleft from a core of frozen jade.

As the Cape Race heads north under the power of a four-stroke diesel engine, rumbling with the beat of a double-time waltz, ocean currents push the icebergs along a counterclockwise path that circles Baffin Bay, leads south through the Davis Strait, and eventually passes Newfoundland on the way to the open Atlantic. According to local legend, the iceberg that sank the Titanic likely calved near Ilulissat, the Cape Race’s embarkation point and the third-largest town in Greenland, with a population of 4,500. What we’re seeing on the first leg out of Ilulissat—icebergs the size of cars, houses, cathedrals—is only a prelude to grander sights to come, Cape Race owner Milos Simovic tells us as he steers from the ship’s bridge. “These aren’t big ones,” he says. “Wait till we’re farther north.”

Spotting icebergs on this seven-day cruise along Greenland’s coast will be like spotting game on an African safari: It may not be quite the entire point of the trip, but it’s compulsory and, as Simovic notes, compulsive. As I watch the views spool past, I’m reluctant to step away for the same reason I wouldn’t leave a movie theater during a momentous scene: There’s a sense that something important is happening, constantly.

"They’re all sizes, all shapes—every one is different,” says Cape Race owner Milos Simovic of the surrounding icebergs as he maneuvers the ship off Uummannaq Island.

Olaf Otto Becker

Greenland’s kingdom of ice represents one of the world’s great spectacles and also one of its most imperiled ecosystems. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization reports that 2014 was the warmest year on record, and ice melt in Greenland has doubled since the 1990s. This past winter’s Arctic sea-ice maximum (the peak amount of area covered by ice in a given season) was the smallest on record, and Greenland’s Inuit hunters who once traveled across solid sea ice to hunt and visit distant neighbors now report that they find open water even in mid-winter. The great melt has serious implications for the rest of the globe as well. A remnant of the last ice age, Greenland’s ice sheet—which holds enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by some 20 feet or more—may now be in an unstoppable centuries-long decline that some scientists describe as “collapse.” Satellite imagery shows that the sheet has shrunk significantly in the past ten years, with glaciers vanishing at its edges: The Jakobshavn Glacier alone has retreated some 25 miles since 1850, when measurements were first recorded. In a very real sense, to visit Greenland today is to see the world changing before your eyes.

A day before the Cape Race is to leave shore, I arrive in Ilulissat from Kangerlussuaq by small plane and am greeted by water in all its states. The Jakobshavn Glacier, visible to the right as we approach for a landing, is spitting out icebergs and muddy meltwater. Fog wreathes the town’s wooden houses, which are painted in vivid colors like aquamarine, cranberry, and iris, providing a visual respite from the duotone natural environment. And between the airport and the harbor, every gully rushes with tea-colored rivulets. It’s mid-August, and as daytime temperatures rise into the sixties, the summer melt comes as a splashing season in giddy contrast to winter’s solid grip.

The next morning, as the Cape Race crew ready the ship for departure, I head out for a walk through Ilulissat to look for souvenirs and lunch. I find plenty of handicrafts carved from narwhal tusk and walrus ivory—species that are legally hunted by Greenland’s native Inuit population but can’t be imported into the United States—and a restaurant advertising Greenlandic “tapas.” The waitress, a thin Greenlandic Inuit woman in her forties who speaks in the distinctive local accent, which combines a Danish lilt with an English nanny’s crisp propriety, brings a platter arrayed with snow crab claws, salmon roe, smoked salmon, tiny shrimp, pickled angelica, cod liver pâté, dried cod, reindeer pâté, minke whale jerky, raw whale skin, and salted seal blubber. Only the blubber requires an effort to swallow, like pork belly stewed in fish oil.

In a very real sense, to visit Greenland today is to see the world changing before your eyes.

Back on the ship after lunch, Simovic calls all hands on deck for a safety demonstration and to practice zipping into a full-body neoprene dry suit that will offer some protection if we have to abandon ship. Without it, the icy water would be fatal within minutes. “The number one safety rule,” says captain Kim Smith, “is don’t fall in.”

My 11 fellow travelers include a research team organized by glaciologist Eric Rignot, professor of earth system science at UC Irvine (UCI) and senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a research facility in Pasadena; his wife, UCI glaciologist Isabella Velicogna; and JPL oceanographer Ian Fenty. Our destination is a series of fjords about 200 nautical miles north of Ilulissat, where the scientific team will work in shifts around the clock to map the sub-ocean terrain and sample water conditions, including temperature and salinity.

“I’m trying to understand the ocean’s role in Greenland’s melting,” explains Fenty, a boisterous and articulate Ph.D. from MIT with the long-hair- and-wire-rim-glasses look of an Outward Bound instructor. “Satellite observations and climate models show us that the Greenland ice sheet has been losing about 250 gigatons of mass per year for the past decade. And the ocean has warmed by 1.5 degrees. Let’s put those things together, go to Greenland, and throw a thermometer over the side to see if that water is affecting those glaciers.”

Over the course of a week of conversations with the scientists, I come to understand with new clarity that while glacial melt is a local phenomenon, the consequences are not. Imagine a bucket filled nearly to the rim with water—the world’s oceans lapping against the continents’ shorelines. An ice cube dropped into the bucket will raise the water level imperceptibly. Another cube will raise it more. Eventually, if you keep adding ice, the bucket will overflow. Greenland’s glacial outflow is filling the world’s bucket, and the UCI-JPL expedition seeks to understand how quickly this is happening by using data gathered on this trip to refine computer models that predict the rate of ocean-level rise. Contrary to propaganda from climate-change deniers, a grim certainty about sea-level rise pervades nearly all of the credible science on the subject. The real question is how much time there is until sea-level rise causes significant social disruption. Or, to put it in unscientific terms, how long until Miami floods? Bangladesh? Holland? New York City? (Rignot and Velicogna are also studying the world’s other ice sheet, in Antarctica, which is larger and also rapidly changing.)

“The ice sheets will be the biggest factor in rising sea levels,” says Velicogna, a cheerful Italian who wears a huge parka, tight jeans, and running shoes with ankle socks. “They are also one of the biggest unknowns.”

Rignot explains that his team has chartered the Cape Race for two consecutive summers—and that they plan to return again the following year—because the fjord systems here are relatively accessible and yet, in many cases, literally unmapped.

“The fishermen know how deep the fjords are,” says Rignot, who has the chiseled face of a mountaineer and the bearing of a chief surgeon accustomed to obedience and esteem. “But the fishermen don’t publish maps. We need very basic information to make our [computer] modeling possible.”

“We are at zero,” interjects Velicogna in her musical accent.

Strange though it is to realize, this UCI-JPL trip is akin to those nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions that set out to map unseen places—although in this case, the unknown terrain lies underwater, the mapping relies on sonar, and the findings will be fed into supercomputers to produce intricately sophisticated predictions about the state of the climate in the decades and centuries ahead.

As we approach latitude 70 degrees north, the approximate brink of the so-called High Arctic, the pale-blue water surrounding the Cape Race turns as opaque as paint. We’re in the silt-laden outflow of the glacier Eqip Sermia and steaming at four knots toward a larger one named Kangilerngata Sermia, which is visible ahead as a sheer ice cliff.

“How far do you think that is?” asks Simovic, who has a subdued if puckish manner. I can tell from his look that I’m going to be wrong, but I play along and guess one mile. Simovic glances over at the radar.

Simovic was born in Serbia and raised in Africa, where his father worked as an architect. He came to the United States in 1986 to study writing and poetics at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University), in Boulder, Colorado, and later became a dealer in East African and Ethiopian art. In 2006, he bought the Cape Race and added five paneled staterooms and a book-lined parlor to create his ideal pleasure boat, albeit a tough one, with an ice-worthy reinforced hull and a 7,000-plus-mile cruising range. Today, Simovic accepts full-boat charters through the company Arctic Kingdom, which specializes in destinations too remote or treacherous for the typical cruise ship. Earlier in the summer, an elderly French widow traveling solo had booked the Cape Race for three weeks to explore Greenland’s far north; on another expedition, a film crew had come aboard to shoot along the Newfoundland coast.

The five miles to Kangilerngata Sermia’s face is a slow crawl through ice floes that become denser the closer we get. Toward noon, the warming temperature causes the ice to come alive noisily, and breaking pieces produce sharp cracks that sound like rifle shots. By noon the fjord is a shooting range. A big underwater breakup creates a boom that reverberates through the ship’s hull. Simovic scans for open water, throttles through the gaps, nudges icebergs aside with the boat’s bow. I’m alarmed to see that the ice in our wake is marked with traces of the hull’s red paint, looking every bit like a trail of blood.

After dinner that night, as the Cape Race approaches still larger glaciers in Torssukataq Fjord, the ice conditions become dramatically more
treacherous. The scientists doggedly continue their work, and Rignot insists that we push on to the glacial face. But the ice is too thick, and soon we’re entirely blocked—“beset by ice” in nautical parlance. At first, Simovic jokes about the tight situation: “We’ve decided to overwinter here,” he says as we drift with the pack ice, unable to find a path out. But the mood grows tense as the hours pass. One member of the scientific team, a veteran of trips to Antarctica, warns that ice can trap a ship “like concrete,” and at one point, I think I hear Simovic mutter under his breath, “This is dangerous.” I realize that if something were to go wrong out here, we’d be on our own—too remote to rescue.

With nothing to do but wait, I head inside for a drink in the galley and see that someone has left a bottle of tequila on the table alongside chips of glacial ice scooped from the sea—gallows humor. At last, near midnight, I feel the engines rumble the ship into motion, and I hurry outside for a final look at Torssukataq’s glaciers in the lingering dusk. Instead, I’m stopped short by the sight of the moon, massive and low on the horizon, as it shines through a break in the clouds—an image that is beautiful and yet almost frightening in its cosmic scale.

Once a commercial fishing trawler, the 110-foot MV Cape Race has been refurbished as an expedition yacht, and now sails Greenland’s frozen coastline.

Olaf Otto Becker

According to local legend, the iceberg that sank the Titanic likely calved near Ilulissat, the Cape Race's embarkation point. What we're seeing on the first leg out of Ilulissat—icebergs the size of houses, cars, cathedrals—is only a prelude of the grander sights to come.

Olaf Otto Becker

"They’re all sizes, all shapes—every one is different,” says Cape Race owner Milos Simovic of the surrounding icebergs as he maneuvers the ship off Uummannaq Island.

Greenland's kingdom of ice represents one of the world's great spectacles—and also one of its most imperiled ecosystems. A remnant of the last ice age, Greenland's ice sheet—which holds enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by some 20 feet or more—may now be in an unstoppable decline. (The Jakobshavn Glacier alone has retreated some 25 miles since 1850).

Olaf Otto Becker

In a very real sense, to visit Greenland today is to see the world changing before your very eyes.

Olaf Otto Becker

By morning, we’re heading north under full steam, and over the next few days, calm seas and light ice allow the team to keep to their mapping schedule. Toward the end of the trip, I ask Rignot if they have been able to make any preliminary observations based on the gigabytes of data gathered thus far. He answers that the fjords are proving to be deeper than previously believed, meaning that the computer models now in use underestimate glacial outflow. Thus, speaking very broadly, predictions of future sea-level rise will likely need to be revised upward from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest assessment of the potential for three or more feet of sea-level rise by the end of this century.

“These things are happening so quickly,” says Rignot, his tone serious and urgent. “It’s a time bomb. We are losing time, and these are not simple issues. They raise very profound questions about how we live in the world. This is one of the most formidable challenges faced by humanity.”

Velicogna nods. “When scientists talk about the collapse of the ice sheets,” she says, “we don’t mean overnight or in one year. Perhaps it is 100 years or 400 years. But what we know is that it’s happening. We can’t stop it. We can only understand how it will evolve, and we can adapt to it, but it’s not going to stop.”

During my last day on the Cape Race, as we head back to Ilulissat past an armada of huge icebergs, I find it difficult to neatly summarize what I’ve learned on board. The immense and potentially lethal beauty of the polar north is a reminder of the individual visitor’s insignificance, and yet the Arctic as a whole is being undone by climate conditions created through humanity’s collective impact. Clearly the most responsible personal decision would have been for me to reduce my carbon footprint by staying home—to choose not to travel—and yet that uncomfortable conclusion came as a result of going to Greenland.

A week or so after I returned home to Los Angeles, my lingering sense of contradiction, a mix of wonder and unease, found expression in an enigmatic dream. In it, I was floating alone in the frigid Arctic water, protected by a dry suit but aware of the peril. Icebergs drifted past, white-blue against the rosy twilight, and I watched the ice slowly melt, drip by drip, wondering how long it would last.